


Delilah

by nephilisms (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bottom Dean, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Episode: s12e12 Stuck In The Middle (With You), Season/Series 12, Wingfic, dean's raging abandonment issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-26 08:15:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9875825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/nephilisms
Summary: Angels aren't supposed to survive the Lance of Michael, but here Cas is, fluttering a set of healed wings instead of dying ugly and slow, all because fuckingCrowleyexploited the mother of all loopholes. And Dean would sooner hack off his own foot with a rusty cleaver than maim the wings Cas only just got back, but since when do cosmic power-ups ever come free?





	1. Chapter 1

Dean wanted to break the fucking thing into a dozen smaller pieces, toss the splinters into a fireplace and roast himself some s'mores over a stack of holy kindling, but Sam and Cas had joined forces to veto that plan before Dean could even finish his sentence. Because it's not like some random Big Bad could feasibly solder the thing back together and finish what Ramiel started.

And, hey. Hadn't that jaundiced motherfucker mentioned a sister? She'd probably come gunning for the Spear of Michael soon as she caught wind of her brother's timely demise.

"Lance," Cas corrects him through the vinyl shower curtain. "It's called the Lance of Michael, Dean."

"Who even cares what the thing's called?" Dean’s hunkered down on the closed toilet lid like a loser, restless with conflicting urges. Stay put and watch over Cas, or manfully make a break for it? "What matters is that it almost killed you, or were you so out of it from the pain that you didn't notice the _black goo_ coming out of your mouth? Not a pretty picture, by the way.”

"The demon Ramiel almost killed me, Dean." The condensation clinging to the bathroom's mounted mirror thickens; Cas' been incrementally turning up the temperature since Dean coaxed him into taking a well-earned shower, and has remained apparently unaffected by the skin-flaying heat while Dean quietly sweats to death. "The Lance of Michael is an inanimate object, and would have posed but a moderate danger to my wellbeing—barring accidents—had it not been wielded by an aggressor."

"You sound like those NRA assholes," Dean marvels, conveniently ignoring the press of his own gun where it's tucked into his waistband. " _Archangel lances don't kill people, people kill people_. Is that what you're getting at here?"

Cas says, "I don't want to fight with you, Dean."

"Who's fighting?" Dean discreetly squeezes sweat from his collar. "I'm not fighting."

Thing is, Dean really hadn't walked into the bunker jonesing for another thrilling round of the Cold Shoulder Shuffle. Matter fact, he'd been riding the high of not having to toss Cas' wasted corpse onto a funeral pyre in the immediate future, only to crash back down through all five layers of the atmosphere when Sam and Cas insisted on preserving the thing that'd punched a hole through Cas’ side.

Preserving it in two separate pieces, sure. Locking those two separate pieces up in two reinforced safes warded in blood sigils against everything from Princes of Hell down to slighted house fairies, fine. But if any life lesson has stuck with Dean, it's the one that’s taught him that loose ends will always come back to bite you on the ass. And now he’s mixing his metaphors, but the point stands.  

The steady background noise of shower spray cuts off, and Cas pushes the curtain open with a spectacular grate of plastic rings across the brass shower rod before Dean can ultimately decide between taking off or keeping his ass planted right where it is. For Christ’s sake, why'd he even stick around? It's not like a slip and fall will so much as concuss the guy—no, Cas can't really die unless his furious older siblings rip his atoms apart, or if he swallows Purgatory and the eldritch horrors that rode in on it, or if a Primadonna of Hell skewers him with a fratricidal lance—

"You're expressing your concern through anger," Cas decides, dripping all over the tile, and Dean tosses him a change of clothes in an act of self-defense.  

"Look at you,” Dean says, except he really isn’t letting himself look all that hard. “You’ve graduated from fossilized shit to shit warmed over. You’ll be firing on all cylinders in no time.”  

"It's common human behavior." Cas ignores the dig as well as the towel Dean shoves at him in favor of getting dressed while he's still soaking wet. He’s flushed all over the same way any normal human would be fresh out of a steaming shower, from the tips of his ears down to his soft dick, and what happened to not looking too hard? "I admit to experiencing a similar emotion whenever you insist on playing the martyr."

Wow. Are long running grudges a family trait or what?  

"Man, like I could forget the look on your face." Cas shimmies into Dean's drawstring sweatpants, stretching them too-right across heavy thighs. His belly peeks out above his waistband, the shallow curve of it as smooth as if it’d never been busted open. "Thought you were gonna throttle me to death yourself and save Billie the trouble.”

"You’re being facetious." Cas scrapes his wet hair out of his eyes, standing it up in spikes along the crown of his head. Dean’s mouth twitches. "Regardless, I wouldn't have saved your life only to turn around and take it myself."

Dean's mouth twinges harder, but for a different reason. He's not even gonna circle the perimeter of _that_ one.

"Dude,” Dean says in lieu of following the thread of meaningful conversation, “you should've toweled off before putting those on. Dry clothes and wet skin don’t go together.”

"I can take them off if it bothers you that much," Cas says, and Dean's too tired and too rubbed-raw to take the easy opening. Are innuendos even allowed anymore? Dean decides that they aren't.

Still. Cas should do the world a favor and wear t-shirts more often, bonus points if they’re damp in places like this one.

Annnd that’s enough of that.

"Seriously, dry off.” Dean throws the fluffy towel he’d bought on rollback at Walmart over Cas’ head. "Because you need a fucking nap, and I ain't about to let you drip all over my mattress."

"You know I don't sleep, Dean," Cas says, muffled by terrycloth, but Dean's already on his merry way out the door.   

If Cas follows him, fine. If he doesn't, also fine. Dean feels very strongly about Cas sitting down and taking a fucking break, but there's only so much you can force an angel to do when he's dying slow, never mind when he's in questionably perfect health.

Except Dean's got his laptop fired up and a stack of _Star Trek_ DVDs wasting space on his nightstand and Cas still hasn't poked his somber little face around the doorframe, and the words _cosmic consequences_ are ringing death knells in the recesses of Dean’s brain, but he's already proven himself to be a pathetic motherfucker by waiting out Cas' shower on the fucking _toilet_ , so he's _not_ gonna jump up like his ass is on fire to make sure that Cas hasn't snuck off to do something passively suicidal—

"I made you a snack," Cas says, manifesting in the doorway, and Dean startles so hard that his knee jerks and sends his laptop tumbling off his thighs and onto the floor, where it settles with its keyboard pointing forlornly toward the ceiling.

Cas pulls the plate of—of Ritz crackers sandwiched around globs of peanut butter, _what_ —closer to his chest, probably expecting Dean to somehow send that tumbling too, even from across the room.

"Are you not hungry?" Cas asks him.  

"No, it's just. Christ." Dean lurches to his feet and retrieves his laptop, assessing the damage. The thing’s fan stutters uneasily, but it's been doing that for six months at least, so he writes that off as unrelated to the tumble it just took. "Anyway. About that snack. Jif or Skippy?"

"Um." Cas brings the plate to eye level and inspects its contents with the keen detachment of someone who doesn’t need to subsist on food. "Peter Pan."

"Well.” Dean eases the laptop shut and tucks it under one arm, the better to liberate his impromptu midnight snack. "It's the thought that counts. Pop a squat, Cas."

Cas does that thing where he looks like his big cosmic brain is buffering, then eases, like, half a butt cheek onto the lower left corner of Dean's bed. Dean scoffs, then kicks at Cas' ankles until he scowls and swivels and brings his legs up onto the mattress.

Dean drops the laptop onto Cas' thighs and nudges him over. " _Original Series_ or _Next Generation_?" he asks around a mouthful of mediocre peanut butter. "And if you say _Enterprise_ , I’m kicking you out.”

"Your television shows won’t disturb me." Cas appropriates two of Dean's pillows and eases himself down slow like he suspects that sudden movements will inspire Dean to make good on his promise of throwing him out. The laptop jostles off his lap and slides onto the bed between them. "But if you don't mind, I'd prefer to lie here quietly. I don't sleep, but I find that I'm...exhausted."

"Hey, who can blame you?" Dean says it easy, like his stomach hadn’t lurched at the word _exhausted_. His brain circles around to how people can just croak in their sleep, death sneaking up on them when their defenses are down. It's fine, though. Cas is fine. "That fucking lance did a real number on you, buddy. I thought Sammy was gonna start bawling, and me without any Kleenex.”

Cas shuts his eyes, chunky lashes fanning out over cheeks that're still soft and pink from the shower. "We aren't cremating the Lance of Michael, Dean.”

"Fuck you, that Dick Joke of Michael has it coming." But Dean sets the picked-clean plate aside on his nightstand and lies down too, folding his arms over his chest. "You gotta leave me alone eventually. You'll be out raiding Costco's with Sam, and I'll put that goddamn holy lance through a wood chipper."

And here’s where Cas says, _We don’t own a wood chipper, Dean_ , and Dean retorts with, _I’ll buy one on Amazon when you’re not looking_ , except.

Except.

Cas blinks his eyes open and tips his head in Dean’s direction. Dean turns away from the eye contact, but not before he notices the water soaking his pillowcase in formless blotches.

 _Goddamn_ , Dean thinks, _I really should’ve taken a blow dryer to that bastard._

"I know it hurt you to see me like that," Cas says, and _nope_ , Dean is so not ready for this. He scrabbles blindly for his laptop, determined to bulldoze this conversation in favor of watching Captain Kirk choke bad guys to death with his thighs, but Cas grazes his fingers over Dean’s knuckles, and Dean just. Stops. "For the sake of your emotional wellbeing, I asked that you let me die alone. And yet, because you are contrary and human, you stayed. Why willingly bear that pain, Dean?"

Dean patiently waits for the mattress to spontaneously rip open down the middle and swallow him.

“Dean.”

"What's it matter?" Dean abandons the laptop and slings his arm over his eyes. "What's it matter when I didn't _have_ to watch you die, huh? You're fine, aren't you?"

"And yet you would destroy the potential instrument of my demise, despite there no longer being any point to it."

If Cas were human, Dean could pretend to sleep. If Cas were human, that lance _might've_ killed him, but death wouldn't've been a guarantee.  

"I know it hurt you, to watch me die in that barn. But I can see and smell death on every mortal thing in my Fa—in God’s creation. Even if you’re never stricken by disease, even if a bullet never lodges in your brain, your cells will one day cease to perform their functions. You’ll break down on a cellular level, Dean.”

"Whoa, okay." Dean forgets about not wanting to look at Cas and lets his arm drop. "This isn't about me. Why the hell are you making this about me?"

"I don't want to hurt you, and I don't want you to dwell on how it felt to watch me die." Cas won't shut the hell up, and Dean's head is pounding and his mouth is drying up, and Cas is just fucking oblivious or uncaring, an ancient quantum _thing_ talking down to a fucking _protozoan_ , and how could Dean have ever tried to distill him to something almost human? "But consider, for a moment, how it would feel to watch me die in slow motion."

The bottom drops out of Dean’s stomach. Fuck, what can he say to _that_? What happened to marathoning _Star Trek_ in awkward but companionable silence?

And what _really_ sucks is that Dean can see where Cas is coming from. Fact is, Dean’s closer to fifty than he is to twenty, and even if he were a normal dude with a mortgage and an annual date with a general practitioner, how much time would he realistically have left? Forty odd years if he’s lucky, and what’s forty years to someone who’s literally older than dirt?

"So you're better at coping with watching your friends die than I am. Okay, fine. You're well-adjusted, I'm not." Cas’ steeply bowed mouth pulls tight, but Dean keeps on talking. "You don’t need sleep, but my maladjusted ass can only take so much in one day. If my alarm goes off, feel free to smite it."

"I told you that I don’t want to fight.”

"If we were fighting, I wouldn’t let you drip all over my bed." Still, Dean yanks a pillow over his face, inhaling the ghost of laundry days’ past, and hopes that he's not being too subtle.

Cas lets it drop—probably not for good, but Dean’ll take what he can get—and Dean can feel him reach over to place the laptop on the nightstand, trailing that soapy, clean-wet skin smell. The muted lamplight diffusing Dean’s pillow disappears with an accompanying _click_.

Cas isn’t touching Dean, but Dean feels smothered anyway. Cas' presence has always felt heavier than it should, a byproduct of stranding four-dimensional entity in a three-dimensional reality. Dean's usually good at ignoring that weight, but his resources are spread thin tonight. He’s devoted too much of his mental energy to blotting out the image of Cas’ torn abdomen. He’s trying too hard to forget the shape of unearned devotion in Cas’ mouth.   

Dean resigns himself to uneasy sleep at best and outright insomnia at worst.  

 

* * *

 

 

Dean’s conscious enough to acknowledge that he’s probably halfway dreaming, but too out of it to take a proactive approach to waking the fuck up. So, when the bed starts to shake, he can’t be sure if he’s imagining an earthquake or experiencing a legit jaunt down the Richter scale.

"Dean."

Not an earthquake. Cas, although the distinction between an angel and an earthquake is goddamn negligible.

"Dean."

 _Fuck_ , Dean thinks, slogging through half-sleep like it's molasses. _If that bastard's jacking it in my bed, I'm gonna twist his dick off._

"Dean, something's wrong."

Only, if Cas were up to something nasty, why the hell would he deliberately wake Dean? Dean’s the undisputed king of sneaky masturbation, okay? He damn well knows how it works, and performing to an awake-and-aware audience is usually counterproductive.

Cas had said: _Something’s wrong_.

Dean reaches for his gun out of habit, but the sour churn in the pit of his stomach tells him that this right here isn't an issue he can shoot away. Bullets sure as fuck weren't of any use against the rotting hole in Cas' abdomen.

Cas coughs, and it's a wet sound. Dean gropes for him in the solid dark, cupping a hand over his mouth to check for the thick spurt of black bile. None, so there's that, but Cas coughs again, and moisture hits Dean's palm. Warm, but not bloodwarm. Not viscous enough, either. Spit, then. Okay. Dean can handle a run-of-the-mill coughing fit.

"Hey," he whispers. “Hey, buddy. Thought you told me you were feeling better. Were you bullshitting me, Cas?"

"No," Cas says, then coughs harder on the tail end of that denial. "No bullshit. At the time, I—"

Cas' sentence cuts off, but he doesn't cough again, either.

Fuck this. Cas was fine, he'd been doing okay, and Dean'd let himself shut his eyes and nap for, what—he chances a look at the digital clock, bright LED numbers standing out stark and disembodied in the dark—less than a fucking hour, okay, and look what happens.

"I can't leave you alone for five minutes, can I?" Dean presses his hand to Cas’ forehead. It's clammy. "Do I need to hire an angel-sitter or what?"

Cas doesn't snap back at him. He was fucking dying earlier and he still had it in him to snark at Dean, and now—now that he's stopped coughing, now that he's stopped speaking, Dean can't even hear him breathe. Something about the silence takes Dean back, way back, back to when Cas was new to him and hitting every prerequisite for application to the uncanny valley, when he wore Jimmy’s skin like a suit.

He should turn on the lights. He should, but he—he just—

"Cas?" Dean’s teeth come together too hard, breaking the single syllable in half.

Fuck. Dean fumbles for Cas’ pulse, relaxing only a little when he finds it.

Dean's fingers twitch. Cas' skin isn't clammy anymore. It's burning hot.  

Cas' eyes are blue. Dean's vision has adjusted to the dark, but it hasn't adjusted that well; he shouldn't be able to tell Cas' pupils from his irises, but he can. Dean can see the bright solid blue Cas borrowed from Jimmy, the blue he kept every time Chuck reassembled his ass, and it's getting brighter. No, it's glowing.

_For Christ's sake, turn on the lights._

Dean opens his mouth to call for Sam, for his mom, but Mom bailed hours ago and Sam’s probably asleep, and anyway, Dean’s tongue shrivels up in his mouth at the sound that finally breaks the quiet.

Wet, but not wet like Cas' nasty phlegm-riddled coughing. Wet like skin being torn open, wet like someone's insides being dunked into and rearranged. And then a drier, thicker sound. Cloth. Cotton. Cas’ shirt tearing from the strain of—

“Dean,” Cas says, and Dean feels nails scrape his cheek when Cas slaps his palm over Dean’s eyes.

Dean belatedly registers the ensuing muted _boom_ as every light bulb in the room shattering all at once.

Guess it’s just as well that he never turned on the lights.

"What the fuck," Dean rasps.

Cas has started to breathe audibly again. Only, no, he hasn’t. That's not what Dean’s hearing.  

Rustling.

Something scratches Dean's cheek. Something that is definitely not a fingernail.

 _Heavy_ , Dean thinks. Cas is so fucking heavy, and it's because of the thing that's crammed inside his vessel.

Cas’ eyes are still glowing.

They’re everywhere, draped over the bed like a canopy, grazing Dean’s cheeks and neck and arms. Goosebumps. Dean’s skin is chilled and crawling with fucking _goosebumps_ wherever they touch him.  

Cas' wings stir uneasily in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dean and I share opinions on peanut butter brands. It's a highly contested topic, I know.


	2. Chapter 2

“I think you should put the frying pan away, Dean. We’re gonna run out of eggs if you don’t let up.”  

Dean doesn’t get what Sam’s problem is. Dean cooks a mean omelet, fluffy and shapely, stuffed with generous portions of bacon and shredded cheddar cheese. Sam should just shut up and eat his fucking breakfast.

“If we run out of eggs, I’ll buy more.” Dean snaps off the stovetop gas, scraping the morning’s fifth omelet out of the spitting frying pan and onto a plate. “What’s it to you, Betty Crocker? You planning on baking a cake or something?”  

"You know what, forget about the eggs.” Sam plants his elbows on the counter and thumbs his temples, ever the longsuffering baby brother. “The point is, that’s five omelets to the three of us. Two of us, because Cas doesn’t eat.”

“You’re a growing boy, Sammy.” Dean rifles through their cutlery drawer, rattling knives and spoons and—fork, he needs a _fork_ —got it. “You need the protein.”

Cas says to Sam, "Your brother is using food as a coping mechanism.”

Dean fumbles his unearthed fork. "Fuck you, you aren't my shrink.”  

Besides, so _what_ if Dean's frying eggs to keep his hands and mind occupied? Cas spontaneously sprouted wings less than an hour ago, okay, and Dean hadn’t dreamt the whole thing up because they're _still there_ , grafted to Cas’ back and molting all over Dean's kitchen floor.

Not _totally_ there, though. Dean can see them and hear them and even feel them, sort of, the way you’d feel a phantom itch. But when he grabbed at them to determine that he was not, in fact, tripping balls, his hand passed right through the flight feathers, and all he'd had to show for his trouble was the lingering sense of having just stuck a wet finger in an electrical socket. For Christ's sake, even the molted feathers dissolve into static as soon as they touch a solid surface.  

Actually—Dean blinks hard—actually, Cas’ undisturbed feathers are starting to dissolve too. Cas’ wings were heavy and practically solid when they’d sprouted, solid enough to shred Dean’s shirt on entry and smother Dean where he sat beneath them, but they passed right through Cas’ shirt and coat when he got dressed, and now they’re starting to look more like afterimages than the flesh-and-blood appendages attached to your average goose. No, not a goose. A bird of prey. Yeah, Cas would probably prefer to be compared to a hawk or a falcon, never mind that geese are, like, _spectacularly_ vicious.

"Run this by me.” Sam focuses on Cas, leaving Dean to sulk into his omelet. "You started to feel weird when, exactly?”

"An hour after Dean had fallen asleep," Cas reports, phantom wings shuddering in reaction like he’s feeling them sprout all over again. "I felt—chilled, and then overheated. And after that—" Cas rolls his shoulders and stretches his wings to their full span, illustrating his unfinished point.

"Yeah, I’m. I'm shocked too, man." Sam reaches out, fingers twitching, then retracts his hand. It’s exactly how he looks when he wants to pet a random dog, and Dean stifles a laugh so he doesn’t inadvertently choke on his omelet. "Look, I know it’s too soon, but do you have any theories? As to, as to how this could've happened?"

"Yes.” Cas pulls his shadowy wings tight against his back. "Yes, of course. I've theorized that my healed wings are a byproduct of surviving the Lance of Michael."

The bite of cheesy omelet Dean's chewing on abruptly loses its warmth and flavor, turning to a hunk of damp cement on Dean's tongue. It takes all he’s got not to spit it back up.

“That’s…” Sam hesitates, then continues with more conviction, “Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I can see that.”

Dean bravely swallows his flavorless omelet and says, "What, so there was a prize at the bottom of the homicidal cereal box? Survive what no angel's survived before and you get a shiny new pair of wings for your troubles?"

"More than a pair," says Cas. "My true form has hundreds of wings, most of which are embedded with thousands of eyes.”

"Save it for the locker room." Dean slices himself another piece of omelet, motivated more by spite than any lingering hunger. "And aren't you, I dunno, _concerned_?"

"Somewhat," Cas admits, raking his fingers through a clump of feathers like they’re more solid to him than they are to Dean.  

"What's there to be concerned about?" Sam asks, but then his face falls. "Oh. Right."

" _Right_ ," Dean mocks. "Shit doesn't come free, Sammy." Unless you're shoplifting or running credit card scams, but. That's beside the point.

"I get where you're coming from, believe me." Sam finally reaches for a plate, accepting the fork Dean passes over with a nod. "But does _almost dying_ really count as free? It's—Cas, was the Lance of Michael, I don't know, did it contain some of Michael’s grace?”  

This is exactly what Dean was trying not to think about.

"Yes, I believe so." Cas runs a thumb over a shadowy feather, staring it like he can't quite believe it's growing out of him, and Dean remembers that it's been literal _years_ since Cas' wings were roasted beyond conceivable repair. "When Michael forged the lance, he would have imbued it with a piece of his grace. I can feel it, actually—Michael’s grace. I can feel it inside me.”  

"Like when you, uh, borrowed Theo and Adina's grace?" Sam guesses, but only after chewing and swallowing his food because Dean didn't raise him in a barn.

"Not quite.” Cas’ eyes turn toward the ceiling in thought. "My own grace has been restored, for one thing, so even if Michael's residual grace were to fade, it shouldn't have any adverse effects on my health. For another thing, an archangel's grace—even a fragment of it—is far more potent than that of the average seraph's."

"So, you're hopped up on the good stuff." Dean polishes off his omelet, contemplating the three that're left. Yeah, better not. "What about your wings? Archangel grace strong enough to undo the damage from Metadick's spell?"

Cas shrugs, and it does weird stuff to his wings. "Wherever it may be, Michael's grace is a part of him. And, having been in the Cage at the time of the Fall, Michael would have remained unaffected by Metatron’s spell.”  

 _And there it is_. "So they're not really _your_ wings anymore? They're just, like, copies of Michael's?"

"They're not exact copies of Michael's wings, no." Cas’ sitting perfectly still, but what Dean can still see of his wings twitch uneasily. "If they were, their manifestation would have triggered a state-wide blackout."

Dean’s brain rewinds to the first apocalypse. He’ll never forget Raphael’s crackling wings, how they’d triggered a violent storm and knocked out the power all along the _Eastern Seaboard_. Those wings would’ve been fucking awesome, in the original sense of the word, if Dean hadn’t been determined to remain unimpressed by all angels who weren’t named _Castiel_.

"Right," says Dean. "They just shattered every lightbulb in my room. That's fine. I needed to make a trip to Home Depot, anyway."

Cas bristles. "I fixed them, didn't I?"

"So, they're like, uh, watered down versions of Michael's wings.” Sam lets his fork drop onto his cleared plate with a pointed _clang_. "Or like. Like photocopies."

"Something to that effect, yes." And now Cas’ wings have all but disappeared in the physical sense, but Dean can still hear them rustling. Can still feel a charge in the air. "And they may revert to their former maimed state once Michael's grace has faded from me."

"But until then, you've got yourself a pair of functioning Xeroxed wings.” Dean smiles hard and bright. "What's up next for you, Cas? Are you going to Disneyworld?"

"Dean, _shut up_ ," Sam begs, but Cas just stares at Dean mutely, and Dean knows. Dean _knows_.

Dean knows that these mended wings are the best thing to happen to Cas since, well, ever.

Because Cas hadn’t walked to the kitchen once things in Dean’s room had settled down. No, Cas had flapped his bird of prey wings and poofed his ass across the bunker, because he was officially no longer chained to one spot like the rest of the flightless mortal losers wasting space on his dad's favorite planet. Dean hadn't run to the kitchen to make sure Cas hadn't flown his ass to Destination Anywhere but Here, no. He'd— _jogged sedately_ , because he was pathetic enough to sit on a toilet while Cas took a shower, but he wasn't pathetic enough to sprint after the guy unless his life was in immediate danger.

And it's not like Dean isn't happy for Cas. It's just.

Angels aren't supposed to survive the Lance of Michael. There's no fucking precedent for this, yet here Cas is, fluttering a set of healed wings instead of dying ugly and slow, all because fucking _Crowley_ exploited the mother of all loopholes. And Dean would sooner hack off his own foot than maim the wings Cas only just got back—he wouldn't, he _won't_ take this from Cas—but since when do cosmic power-ups ever come free?

"Look, buddy," Dean starts, seriously not wanting to have this conversation in front of Sam but not wanting to ask Sam to give them some privacy, either, except then his pants vibrate.  

"Not me," says Sam, patting around for his phone. Cas doesn't bother to go for _his_ phone, either because it's not on him or because his fancy angel hearing can pinpoint the exact source of the buzzing.

 _Sheriff Mills calling_. Dean doesn’t want to do this, but Jody and the girls could be in serious trouble. He picks up just before his phone transfers the call to voicemail.

"Yeah.”  

"Someone’s excited to hear from me.”

Dean scrubs at his eyes. "Sorry, Jody. It's been a long night. Day. Whatever."

"You doing okay, kiddo?" Jody immediately pulls out the Mom Voice, and Dean. Dean cannot deal with that right now. He can’t deal with a lot of shit.

"Why wouldn't I be okay? I just ate an omelet, I'm frigging awesome." Dean puts his back to Sam and Cas, hunching in on himself a little. "What’s the emergency? You finally asking me out to dinner or what?”  

"In your dreams, kid. It's about a job, actually."

"You got something lined up for us?" Dean flicks a feather off his shoulder— _when did that get there_ —and watches it dissolve on contact.

"Well, no. I mean, yes? I thought I had it covered, actually. Standard salt-and-burn. A neighbor of mine reported multiple sightings of his recently deceased wife, and at first I wrote it off as grief, you know? Jennifer Taggart—that's the dead wife—she died pretty young, and you know how that is."

Dean thinks of how he never had to worry about Cas dying on him until he did, repeatedly, and says, “Yeah. Yeah, I get that.”  

"But then other sightings started cropping up, and these were from people who hadn’t even known her all that well, so I paid a visit to the cemetery.”

"Please tell me the body was in the grave.” Because this is Sioux Falls they're talking about, and he wouldn't put it past that place to go all _Night of the Living Dead Part II_ on their asses.

"It was, yeah. I burnt her bones and figured that was it.”

Dean waits for Jody to follow through on the _but_.

“But, someone reported an armed robbery at a twenty-four-hour gas station, and the culprit matched Jennifer’s description to a T.”  

"Well, hell," says Dean. "Either Jenny from the Block faked her own death to start a second life of crime, or we've got a shifter on our hands."

"Probably, yeah. You free, or do you wanna sit this one out?"

"I'm in," says Dean, unhesitating, because trigger-happy shapeshifters? Those he can handle.

"All right, what about Sam and your mom? Or Castiel?"

"Mom's, uh. Unavailable. And I don't think Cas—you've met Cas?"

"Not in person, no, but I've spoken with him on the phone. He likes to keep in touch with Claire."

Dean has a vivid and disturbing image of Jody and Cas talking smack about him and Sam over the phone while they paint their toenails. "Um, okay. Sorry to disappoint you, but I think Cas is gonna sit this one out."

Dean hears the beat of wings before he feels Cas’ body heat scorching his side, and snaps, "Oh, now you're just showing off," just as Cas gets a grip on Dean's phone and tugs it toward his mouth.

"Hello, Sheriff Mills," says Cas, not even pretending to be affected when Dean stomps on his foot. "I would be happy to accompany you on your hunt. I'll be there momentarily."

"Um," says Jody, "what—holy _shit_.”  

Dean would laugh, honestly, if he weren’t fucking _fuming_.

"Jody, meet Cas. Tell him what you think of his new makeover." Dean hangs up without saying goodbye, figuring that Jody'll be too distracted by the angel in her living room to pay him any attention, anyway.

Breaking his own phone in a frustrated fit wouldn’t do him any good. Dean sets the phone down on the counter— _gently_ —before he can totally lose his shit. Just in case.

And when he turns around to face Sam, he immediately wishes that he hadn't.

"What?" Dean snaps, knowing full well that he won’t like whatever it is that Sam wants to say.  

Sam pulls an innocent face and reaches for another omelet, his earlier complaints about wasted eggs forgotten. "It's okay to feel insecure, you know," he says, cryptic.

"Insecure?" Dean snatches the frying pan from the stove top, waves it in threat, and clomps over to the sink. "Your _face_ is insecure."

Sam says, "Do you want me to do the packing," and Dean turns on the faucet to drown him out.

 

* * *

 

Dean's lighter won't catch.

It's not even his actual lighter. He dropped his _actual_ lighter two months and change ago while he was getting roughed up by Satan-in-chief's goons. Dean bought _this_ piece of mass-produced shit in a three-pack at some interchangeable gas station identical to the one outside of which he's currently loitering.

Instead of crushing the disposable lighter under his boot, Dean distracts himself from his own problems by focusing on someone else's dysfunction.

"Look, I get that it's awkward." Dean holds his breath and flicks the lighter's wheel. No luck.

"Awkward for me? Not really." Claire folds her arms on top of Baby’s roof and tucks her chin into the crook of her elbow. "You're the one who won't look him in the eye.”

He's _trying_ to focus on someone else's dysfunction, anyway.

“You do know that you shouldn’t play with lighters around _gas pumps_ , right?”

If Dean still smoked, he'd light up here and now out of spite, but goddamn, _he's_ the fucking adult. So, he clicks the damn lighter shut and pockets it before turning an _are-you-satisfied_ look on Claire.

"I mean, if you're coping with your own issues by distracting yourself with mine, then, yeah. It's awkward." Claire watches Cas through the convenience store’s windows. "I mean, it's not like I hate him. If I hated him, I'd block his number."

Dean damn well knows he’s being condescended to. Still. "Block his number anyway. Exit the emoji train while you still can." Then, "That was a joke. Don't actually ignore his texts, okay? He's, y'know. Been having a hard time."

 _Was_ having a hard time. Dude's so hopped up on Michael’s borrowed juice that his confidence’s been restored along with his wings, prompting him to try interviewing a witness solo. Leaving Dean right where he is, babysitting Cas’ not-kid.

"Flunking out of your first semester of college is a _hard time_ ," says Claire, and she'd know, because she's at that age. The one where a normal kid gets some independence and a degree and a truckload of debt. "Getting _possessed_ by your dysfunctional older brother who also happens to be the literal devil? Is PTSD-level fuckery."

"Am I supposed to threaten to wash out your mouth with soap?" The one time Ben had said _shit_ in front of Dean, he'd deferred to Lisa, because actual moms have obvious authority over not-stepdads, and he's got even less parental claim to Claire than he did to Ben. "Or is that not a thing anymore?"

"Not unless you're a _Leave It to Beaver_ rerun," says Claire, and Dean grins wide and genuine at her, because it's been a while, and he'd nearly forgotten how much of a glorious asshole she could be.

Dean’s not exactly overjoyed to have Claire tagging along, but interviewing shaken retail workers isn’t on the same level as throwing yourself in front of a pissed off shapeshifter, and maybe Claire’ll be satisfied with this and sit out on the real hunt. Probably not, though.

Dean’s happy for the buffer, at least. Claire wasn’t wrong when she said that things between Cas and Dean seem _awkward_.

"I think I'm happy for him," Claire's saying, and Dean startles.

"Whatcha mean?" he asks, and she rolls her eyes. Had Dean rolled his eyes this often when he was a kid? Unlikely, because if he had, his dad would’ve thumped him upside the head and knocked them outta his skull.

"I mean, he's been through a lot of shit—like, a lot of it was his own fault, but some of it wasn’t—and it's good that he's finally gotten something out of it, you know?"

Dean drums his fingers against Baby’s roof, glancing from Claire over to where Cas’ standing in full view of the Gas-n-Sip’s window. His wings have gone full invisible, but Cas’ standing straighter than usual like he’s compensating for the new weight.

"I flew with him, you know." Claire presses her forehead to her wrist, thick twists of hair falling over her face. "When I let him in, he flew. It was—I dunno how to describe it. I don’t think anyone could.”  

Claire doesn't _need_ to describe it, though. He can hear it in her voice.

"The cashier kept a gun on her person during work hours. The bullets didn't work on her assailant."

Dean swears under his breath, pulse jumping.

You'd think Dean would be used to Cas zapping in and out, and even without his wings, he was a sneaky fucker, but it's been a while, okay? Maybe Cas can revert to his pre-Fall days like it's nothing, but Dean's human and he needs time to adjust.

"She let you look at the security tapes?" Claire asks, brushing her hair out of her face and talking to Cas normal and easy, like she wasn’t just reliving how it felt to share her skin with him.

"Yes," says Cas, the corner of his mouth ticking up in that way it sometimes does. "Its eyes flashed silver."

"Cool," says Dean, rapping his knuckles against Baby's roof. "Let's get a move on, then."

Because it looks like the shifter couldn’t content itself with whatever was in the Gas-n-Sip’s register. Since Sam and Dean and Cas got here, a Target and a sporting goods store have also chimed in with reports of suspicious armed robberies. Sam and Jody are casing the sporting goods store, which leaves the Target to Dean and company.

Wait, no. The Gas-n-Sip's basically abandoned, so Dean hadn't given it much thought, but how're the respectable nuclear families at the Target gonna feel about a young girl walking around with two grown-ass, big-ass men?

"Maybe we should drop Claire off at Jody's first," says Dean, only to be treated to Claire's laser eyes. "What? A kid walking around with a couple of grown guys—"

"Please." Claire circles the Impala, going for shotgun. "You’re both old. They’ll just assume I’m your kid.”  

Dean's brain stutters, hiccupping over _old enough to be her dad_ , circling back around to how he's middle aged and dying slow from an angel's perspective, and outright skipping over the _other thing_ that Claire implied.  

"Guess that puts you in the backseat, buddy," Dean says, silently congratulating himself on how normal he sounds, but Cas shakes his head.

"No," says Cas. "I'll go on ahead. It'll save time."

And there he goes, leaving Dean with a nascent stomach ache and an itch under his skin.

“Goddammit.” Dean yanks open Baby’s driver side door. “This shit’s giving me hives.”

 

* * *

 

"I'm thinking hardcore reconstructive surgery," is the sales associate's opinion, and, well, she's not wrong. "Either that or a mass hallucination."

Her name tag reads _Violet_ , not that that means anything, and she's maybe Claire's age, too normal looking with her lacquered nails and tightly curled hair to have to witness the kind of shit Dean and Cas are asking her about. And she _is_ a witness to what Dean’s calling the Great Target Incident, but she’s not the sales associate who confronted their rogue shifter.

Because the sales associate who confronted their rogue shifter is currently badly concussed.

"You recognized the assailant, then?" Cas asks Violet, and stilted social skills aside, there's something about Cas' gravelly voice and intense expression that convinces people that they are, in fact, speaking to a trustworthy authority figure.

"Well, yeah," says Violet, stepping deftly out of the way when a cart steered by a preteen comes barreling past. "He looked exactly like my parents' neighbor. Except he couldn’t’ve been Mr. O'Neal, because Mr. O'Neal died last week." And then, just in case she thinks they're missing the point here, she adds, "Of pancreatic cancer."

"Yeah, that'll do it," Dean says, and Violet scowls.

"Thank you for your cooperation. Call us if you think of anything else." Cas forks over their contact info, and the hair on the nape of Dean's neck stands up when Cas' arm brushes his. Those incorporeal wings of his manage to take up a lot of space on the corporeal plane, and Dean keeps bumping into them. It’s driving him up the goddamn wall.

"Yeah, no problem," says Violet, just as Claire stalks over from where Dean had told her to hang back by the self-checkouts. Violet's eyes bounce from Claire to Cas to Dean, and her arched brows say it all.  

"It's Bring Your Daughter to Work Day," Cas says without hesitation, and Dean’s mouth twitches.  

“I didn’t know the FBI had those…” Violet trails off, face softening. “Oh. When you said you were partners, I didn’t think—”

"Yeah," says Claire, tucking one arm through Cas' and the other through Dean's, which, fine. Let _her_ take the brunt of a slow, feathery suffocation. "This one's my dad," Claire tips her head against Cas' shoulder, then jerks her chin at Dean. " _He’s_ just my dad’s trophy boyfriend. That’s a thing, right?”  

And Cas’ thankfully too busy making goopy eyes at Claire—which, hey, even if she’s being a little shit, it probably does weird things to the guy’s insides to hear the kid he loves call him _Dad_ —to notice the five different colors Dean’s face turns.

"That's cool," Violet's saying. "I've got a girlfriend, y'know. She wants me to quit, with the shit that's been going on, but it's steady work. And honestly, I’ve had worse.”

“Quit your job? In this economy?” Cas squints at Dean, and Dean decides that now’s the time to make a graceful exit. He simpers, “I’ll go start the car, _honey_ ,” wiggles out of Claire’s hold, and books it.  

Dean takes a shortcut down the cosmetics aisle, squinting in defense against the lit-up displays and artfully positioned mirrors. He doesn’t let himself take a well-deserved deep breath until he’s cleared the building’s automatic doors.

The air's frigid and unpleasant courtesy of surly midwinter, but it's better than the floor-polish and burnt-popcorn smell clogging up the air inside the Target. The sun's mostly set, but it's sitting at just the right angle to make Dean wish he'd brought along a pair of shades.

"Cas' hanging back for a minute." Claire materializes at Dean's elbow out of literally nowhere like she’s still an active vessel and still able to fly. "Last I saw, Violet was convincing him to buy a Magic Bullet."

See, if Claire were, you know, a real actual adult, here's where Dean would make a joke along the lines of, _Is that a brand of vibrator_ , but all he's hearing is _Bring Your Daughter to Work Day_ and _This is my dad and his trophy boyfriend_ , so he chokes back the juvenile commentary.

Shit, he’s _old as balls_.  

"You shouldn't get his hopes up like that," Dean says, opting to sound like the responsible old guy he is. "Saying he's like your dad, I mean."

Because Cas loves Claire, and it could be chalked up to a sense of accountability, could be Jimmy’s leftovers, but Dean doesn’t think so. Cas doesn’t love Claire like a daughter, exactly; he’s an angel, and they just don’t work the way humans do. Humans can’t even begin to comprehend what passes for angelic love, which only makes what Cas had said on his dying breath that much scarier.

"He's the closest thing I've got to a dad," says Claire, flicking her shoulders up and down on one of those dismissive adolescent shrugs, but her cheeks are flushed, and Dean doesn’t think it’s from the cold.

Dean opens his mouth to tease Claire, but he snaps it back shut in the next minute, too fast, clipping his tongue with his teeth and drawing blood. But the rusty penny taste gathering on his tongue’s not important, because Dean’s been keeping one eye on the emptying parking lot, and he can’t believe what he’s seeing. 

This is what they’ve got: a shifter who likes to make itself up to look like dead people and rob retail outlets, with no way of predicting which store it’ll hit next. And now Dean can work _fucking amateur_ into the equation, because something that looks a lot like Jennifer Taggart has returned to the scene of the crime, skulking the parking lot’s perimeter.

"Get inside." Dean grabs Claire’s arm, probably too tight. "Right now."

"The hell are you— _shit_." Claire wavers, and Dean can see what's going through her head because the same conflicting urges always went through _his_ whenever he hunted with his dad. She wants to go for Tamiel's angel blade and stab the shifter in the heart, but she also wants to get out of the way so she doesn’t fuck up Dean's lock on the thing, and most of all she wants to tell Dean where to shove it.

The automatic doors fly open to let Claire back up over the threshold, and the crick in Dean's neck eases a little.

Dean stuffs his hands in his coat pockets, groping for his car keys, and makes himself walk slow and steady down the closest row of cars. Fake Jennifer Taggart's coming up the opposite side, and Dean hooks a left between a minivan and a rusty SUV. His arms stick out too far for their squeezed-in parking jobs, though, and his elbow knocks into the minivan's side view mirror. The grip he’s got on his keys slackens in reaction, and he lets himself mutter, “Shit,” as he stoops to retrieve them.

She must’ve heard him swear, because she glances in his direction once before doing a doubletake. Her smile's about as plastic as her borrowed face, but Dean forces himself to smile back when she kneels to retrieve the keys that'd skittered in her direction.

"Thanks," Dean says, conversational.

"No problem," she says, or starts to, going still at the click of his gun's safety, and stops breathing altogether when the muzzle nudges her chest.  

"I think you've got the wrong person," she says, eyes watery and mouth pulled so tight that the pink skin bleaches, and maybe that would trip up other people, maybe it would make them hesitate, but Dean just grins at her, and means it this time.

"Do I? Because, I've gotta say, you are the spitting image of Jennifer Taggart, and unless she's got an identical twin I don't know about, you're just some shapeshifting asshole with sticky fingers." Dean wiggles the gun. "Silver bullets, by the way. In case you didn’t guess.”  

"I guessed," says the shifter, and lashes out with Dean’s keys. Dean hisses when the metal teeth scrape him just under the eye, but he squeezes off a shot.

Blood splatters the pavement, and the thing howls, dropping the keys, but Dean didn't get her in the heart. He shot her in the thigh, dammit.

 _Can't get too far with a limp, at least_ , Dean thinks, scrambling up to give chase, but it turns out that he shouldn’t’ve bothered.  

Cas just _appears_ , invisible feathers rustling in agitation as much as flight, and palms the shifter's forehead before it can register what's happening.

Dean registers it all, though. He sees the thing under Cas' skin press closer to the surface, sees it flash in his two mundane human eyes and flare like a halo above his head. He sees the shifter light up from the inside, sees Cas burning out its eyes and brain and viscera like there’s nothing to it, like he could do this all day. His hair’s windblown and his mouth is etched in a barely-there snarl and he is, fuck Dean sideways, unbelievably hot.

The burnt-out shifter’s dead weight slumps sideways.

Cas is carrying a _shopping bag_ in his free hand.

They're gonna. They're gonna have to get Cas to tamper with the security tapes. They’ve gotta get rid of the body.

Yeah. In a minute.  

Dean flops onto his ass. "Don't tell me you bought the Magic Bullet," he says.

 

* * *

 

Cas did not buy a Magic Bullet.

At least, Cas _says_ it’s not a Magic Bullet. Cas won’t let Dean look inside the shopping bag, but he’s assured Dean that, whatever it was he bought, it’s not an overpriced blender.

"Hey, kid." Jody plants an elbow in Dean's side, catching his eye and indicating the gaping doorway. “You coming inside sometime tonight?"

Cas' sitting next to Claire and Alex on Jody's couch, showing Claire something that Dean can't see from this angle. Whatever it is, it makes Claire smile around the Pringles she's been cramming five at a time into her mouth.

"Yeah, in a minute." Dean drops onto his ass, kneecaps popping when he stretches out his legs. “Nice night, huh?”

“It’s below freezing, but okay.” Jody pats him on the head in passing. “I’m locking the door after me, so knock when you want back in.”

"Uh-uh," says Dean, making a face when a cat pees in the neighbor’s bushes, and he hears Jody sigh long and low before she retreats inside.

The cat with poor bladder control launches itself onto a low brick wall and starts to yowl. An unnatural breeze ruffles Dean’s hair, and he grimaces.

“You too good for doors now or what?”

Cas settles himself beside Dean, shopping bag cradled between his knees. What, does he want Dean to recycle it for him?  

"I bought you a gift," Cas says. "It was on clearance." 

Dean flexes his fingers. He bets that fucking cat wouldn’t have so much to say if its owners got it neutered. "But it's not a Magic Bullet."

"No, it's not a Magic Bullet." Cas holds the bag out by the handles, expectant. Dean doesn't take it.

"I saw you handing Claire something," says Dean. "Whatcha buy her?"

"A variety pack of eyeliner." Cas narrows his eyes and drop the bag into Dean's lap. "Will you accept my gift or not?"

Cas will just _look_ at him until he does, so. Dean roots around in the bag and comes up with a pink cardboard box.

It’s a Hershey Kiss, one of those big-ass special edition deals the size of a fist that they put out around holidays.

It’s ridiculous. _Cas_ is _ridiculous_.

"A belated birthday present," Cas says. "Or a belated Valentine's gift, if you'd like."

Dean squeezes the thing, denting the cardboard. Since when does Cas buy him chocolate? Dean’s so keyed up for so many reasons that he opens his mouth and says, of course, something utterly and epically _stupid_.

"Thought you wouldn't want to be reminded of my birthday." Dean drops the chocolate back into the bag twisting the handles into a knot so he doesn’t have to see inside. "Since you gotta watch me die in—what was it— _slow motion_.”

Instead of getting cranky and lashing out like Dean wanted him to, Cas says evenly, “I never understood the point of birthdays, but I’ve come to accept that they’re a celebration of life rather than an acknowledgment of impending death. Even if it’s a bit backwards to celebrate the child when the mother did all the work.”

Dean redistributes his weight, trying and failing to find a comfortable spot on this stone-cold porch. At this point, it’s a toss-up over which will go totally numb first: his ass or his fingers.

“You’d be a hit at parties,” Dean finally says for lack of snappier comebacks.

"Unlikely,” says Cas, invisible wings churning.

Dean sucks it up gives Cas a pat, digging his fingers into the meat of his shoulder. Those damn feathers give him little static shocks wherever they touch him, but he can deal. For Cas, he can deal.

"Man.” Dean sighs explosively, then sighs harder when Felix the Cat turns up the volume. “Today was fucked up. It's gotta be shitty to see someone you knew walking around acting like a freak. Like the world's shittiest puppet show.”

Cas says nothing, which, okay, awkward lulls in conversation are par for course when you’re talking to Cas, but Dean’s brain is screaming _abort mission abort mission_ at him because.

Because Dean _does_ know what it’s like to watch someone you care about act like a freak. He knows what it’s like to watch a malignant alien _thing_ tunnel down your family member’s throat and steer their body around like they own it. He saw it first with his dad, then Sam, then Bobby, then _Cas_ ; he even saw it happen to Jody.

Lucifer had moved Sam and Cas’ faces all wrong, used their voices at the wrong register, had torn Dean up just by _being_.

So, yeah. He thinks he knows how Jenny Taggart’s husband must’ve felt.

"It was awful, of course," Cas says, crumpling the hem of his ugly coat in his fists, fidgeting as any normal human guy would. "Sharing my vessel with Lucifer."

Dean licks his lips. "Buddy, you don't have to—”

“But I felt it, after a fashion. I could feel it when he flew.”

Dean’s gastrointestinal tract drops into his kneecaps, but other than that, he’s fine. “Cas—”  

Cas flaps his wings, and Dean bites off what he was gonna say, scanning the street for—

Cas’ hunched over the resident singing cat across the way, raking his fingers through its striped fur, and Dean shudders in sympathetic reaction when the thing arches its back. It stopped yowling as soon as Cas touched it, but Dean’s certain that it’s purring.  

Cas blinks back to Jody’s porch, saying, “I know you’re allergic to cats, but would you consider—”

Dean clenches his jaw.

“You’re unhappy.” Cas tilts his head, examining Dean the way he examined that damn cat. “You’ve been acting strange since Michael’s grace healed my wings.”

"They're not _your_ wings," Dean snaps, then regrets it. Cas doesn't flinch, but Dean can feel him close down, close off. "I'm just worried, all right? What happens when Michael's grace fades? Will you really be okay? Because, buddy, you've got a shitty track record when it comes to stolen grace.”  

Cas straightens up a little, and Dean can feel the age of him, feel how far beyond his vessel he really goes. Dean waits for the thunder, for the sparking powerlines.

"What would you have me do, Dean?” Cas’ voice cracks when he says Dean’s name. “Would you have me cut off my wings? Would that make you happy?"

Fuck. _Fuck_ , Cas must think Dean’s a selfish motherfucker. Dean remembers Ishim, remembers how the words _your human weakness_ drilled into his brain. Dean’s a liability to someone, some _thing_ , that’s unbelievably far beyond him. For god’s sake, Cas’ real face could burn Dean’s fucking eyes out, Cas’ real voice could melt every organ system in his body, and here’s Dean, a comparative _gnat_ , throwing a tantrum because Cas’ wings make it easier for Cas to leave him.

"No," Dean says, voice weaker than he wants it to be. "I don't want you to cut off your wings. You really think I'd ask for that?”  

"I think," Cas says, teeth-gratingly gentle, "that you don't want me to leave you.”

Dean’s pulse slams in his throat like it’s trying to tear through his skin. Cas is so fucking beautiful, and Dean’s a goddamn coward who doesn’t deserve half of what Cas could give him.

If he deserved Cas, he wouldn't flip out over something that makes Cas _happy_.

 _Dean’s_ never made Cas this happy, and he wants to.

Dean wants to make Cas feel good, get his grimy human hands all over that holy vessel and dirty him up. He wants to jack Cas off smooth and slow, slick his palm up with lube and thumb the slit in his pretty cockhead. He wants Cas to come all over his fingers, sloppy, and then _he_ wants to come on _Cas_ , come on his tan stomach or is prominent hipbones or in his gorgeous pink mouth.

The front door bangs open, clipping Dean in the back and knocking the breath out of him.

At least the pain goes a long way toward killing his arousal before it can become a problem.

"Shit, sorry." Jody clatters onto the porch, short hair standing up in clumps where she must've raked her fingers through it. "Boys, we've got a situation."

"Sam steal Claire’s conditioner yet?” Dean asks, because he's an ass, but his stomach’s already balled up in reaction to how _unnerved_ Jody looks.  

"There was another armed robbery," says Jody, and Dean and Cas exchange looks. "And the assailant matches Jennifer Taggart's description."

 _Shit_.

The shifter Cas ganked hadn’t been a loner.

There’d been two of them.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure everyone else had the same thought about Cas' recovery from the Lance of Michael--that this might be the catalyst for the power-up the showrunners had mentioned. I also wish that more people would take a crack at this scenario before Cas' S12 storyline resumes ~~so I don't have to~~.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter are detailed in the end notes.

Monkey wrench or no monkey wrench, a hunter’s gotta eat, which is why Dean’s sitting on Baby’s hood, scooping rubbery chicken strips out of a cardboard container.

“Not the first time we didn’t have the whole picture on a hunt,” Dean says to Claire, who’s picking through Dean’s order of soggy French fries. “One way or another, we’ll get the little fu—bastard.”

"You can say _fuck_ in front of me.” Claire unearths and munches on what was probably the least-soggy fry of the bunch. "I promise I won’t tattle.”

"Cross your heart?" Dean asks, and Claire obligingly swipes an _X_ over her heart. "Right, while you're at it, promise you won't get hurt too bad on my watch, ’cause I'm not sure who scares me more: Jody or Cas."

“This is a pretty basic hunt, right?” Claire asks, and Dean nods, because Cas’ upgrade aside, this is the most normal he’s seen since going to maximum security prison. “Then I’ll be fine. Also, Jody. Jody’s the one you should be scared of.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

These chicken tenders are a lost cause. Dean tips the greasy container in Claire’s direction just in case she’s feeling adventurous, and gets a wrinkled nose by way of reply. There aren’t any trashcans nearby because this is a fucking parking lot, and the nearest waste bins are planted by the Walmart’s automatic front doors. Dean and Claire’re supposed to stay mostly put while Cas and Sam case the Walmart’s yawning interior, so Dean resigns himself to letting the takeout rot in Baby’s backseat for the next couple hours at least.

They stayed up all last night in a revitalized effort to find a pattern, and now that they could factor in the second shifter, they found one. This Walmart should be next, but it might not be. The second shifter could’ve noticed that its partner’s missing, tweaked to the hunters gunning for it, and skipped town. Dean’s betting that’s not how things’re gonna go down, though.

Dean tosses the takeout bag into Baby’s backseat, clipping the door shut behind it and ambling back around to park his ass on the car’s hood. Claire sets her pilfered fries aside, nudging Dean’s ribs, and he glances up.

Cas takes long strides toward them through the supersized parking lot, coat swinging around his knees. His eyes are only half-open, and he’s grinding his knuckles against his pleated forehead.

"You okay there, buddy?" Dean asks him when he stops in front of them.

"Yes, I'm fine." Cas stops knuckling his forehead, only to start in on his temples.  

"You sure?" Dean hovers a hand over Cas' shoulder, but Cas steps out from under it. Okay, fine. Dean probably deserved that. "Michael juice getting to you? Man, I told you this shit never comes free."

"I'm fine, I said," Cas snaps, dropping his hands and shoving them into his pocket, and Dean sees Claire frown in his periphery. Cas grimaces, clearing his throat. "I'm—apologies. I came out here to relay news. Sam believes that he's spotted the shapeshifter."

Dean straightens out of his slump. "He sure about that?"

"Yes. It’s…loitering in the frozen foods aisle.” Cas wrinkles his nose. “It's taken the form of a man who recently died of an aneurism. I can show you the obituary, if you'd like," Cas indicates the folded-up newspaper that Dean had set down on Baby’s hood.  

"Nah, I'm good. Sammy wouldn't've sent you out here unless he was sure." Dean mirrors Cas' stance, putting his hands in his pockets in defense against the late-night freeze. "I'm surprised you walked to us, though. You've been flying everywhere these days." Even across the room for the remote, Christ.

"It's been a very long time since I've been free to fly, Dean." Cas goes back to thumbing his temple. "Walking has become something of an ingrained habit."

"Yeah," says Dean. "That makes sense, I guess. You sure you're okay, buddy?"

"As I said, I'm fine. In any case." Cas reaches for Claire with his free hand, hooking it around her elbow. "Sam believes that it would be best for you to escort Claire home. She's too untrained to confront a provoked shapeshifter."

"Hey, why do I gotta take the kid home?" Dean scoots off Baby’s hood and steps into Cas' space. Cas leans back, tugging a resisting Claire with him. "You can poof Claire to Jody's, fly back here, and we'll take the thing down together. How's that?"

Cas licks his lips, eyes darting everywhere. Everywhere but Dean.

"Michael's mojo run out already?" Dean asks.

"No," Cas says, hesitant. "No, that's not it—”

Claire’s angel blade drops into her hand from where she’d tucked it into her sleeve. She gets a good grip on the hilt, rears out of Cas’ grip, and stabs Cas in the eye.

Claire pulls back prematurely when Cas lashes out at her with a hand that’s clawed up in pain, so the blade doesn’t go deep enough to drill into his brain. Dean can see that his eye’s ruptured, though, red and ugly and definitely half-blinding him.

Claire backs up and draws even with Dean, shifter blood dripping off her angel blade. “Sorry,” she says. “I almost had it.”

“You did great.” Dean pats her on the shoulder, then shifts in front of her on instinct, ignoring her frustrated scoff. 

The shifter’s hunched down on its knees between Baby and a neighboring sedan, pressing a hand to its ruined, bleeding eye. It snarls at Dean when he draws his gun, uninjured eye wheeling.

“Now, this? This isn’t your MO.” Dean clicks off his gun’s safety, hoping to god they can clean up this mess before some late-night shopper spots them and calls security. “You only ever make yourself up to look like dead people, right? Stump the cops, give yourself time to change faces and hit the next local retailer. You and your partner were a regular Bonnie and Clyde. You know, before we ganked ’em.”

"Stop talking and _shoot it_ ," Claire snaps, jerking forward, but Dean nudges her back.

The shifter hasn’t lashed out like Dean expected, and he’d say it’s the ruptured eyeball, but he’s seen shifters with worse injuries come after people.

And it’s not just clutching its ruined eye now; it’s holding its head with both hands, fingers digging down hard and white-knuckled like it’s got the mother of all migraines.

And the thing about shifters.

The thing about shifters is that, floppy skin and flashy eyes aside, they’re next to impossible to tell apart from the people they imitate. They don’t just put on someone else’s skin; when they shift, they establish a kind of psychic connection with the person they’re copying, essentially _becoming_ that person.

And now this shifter’s on its knees, trying to hold in its melting gray matter because it just can’t process the shit that goes down in an angel’s brain.

"Cas is an _angel_ , you dumb fuck." Dean smiles, wild and mean. "You can't handle what's in his head."

It tries to shift. Dean sees its bones churn, watches it let go of its head to tear at the skin on its borrowed hand, opening its mouth wide as its teeth pop out one by one to make room for a new set. It’s trying to shift before its brain can overheat and die.

And then Dean sees double. Cas, hunched on the pavement and bleeding out from one eye. Cas, displacing reality with a rush of invisible feathers and reaching out a hand to smite. The real Cas catches Dean's eye, questioning, and Dean nods. Burning the thing out'll be less obvious than shooting it, anyway.

One muted burst of light later, Fake Cas’ burnt-out shell flops empty and half-shifted on the pavement.

With all the shit Dean’s seen on Earth and in Hell, shapeshifters are always gonna be a special kind of nasty.

"Claire," Cas says, "go get Sam."

"Uh." Claire goes to wipe her blade off on her jeans, thinks better of walking into Walmart with bloodstains on her pants, and tucks it back into her sleeve. "Okay. Yeah, sure. Be right back."

Dean listens to Claire's retreating footsteps, looking from the revolting picture the shifter's corpse makes to Cas' solemn face and back again.

"Hey," Dean finally says. "Thanks for the assist, I guess."

"You could’ve handled it," Cas tells him. "I simply expedited the process, and I'm sorry if I overstepped.”

"No. No, it's." Dean clicks on his gun’s safety before tucking it into his waistband. "It's cool. You sure are handy, aren't you?"

“All I want is to be of some use,” says Cas, not moving, which leaves Dean to suck it up and take the initiative. Step one, circle the dead shifter and get in Cas’ space.

Step two, make Cas feel better without putting his goddamn foot in his goddamn mouth.

"You're useful, Cas." Of course they're having a heart-to-heart next to a dead body, _of course they are_. "You don't—you don't need wings to be useful, okay?"

 _I love you_ , Cas had said while he was dying, and Dean can’t say it back to him, he can’t even thank him properly for that stupid fucking Hershey Kiss that sits uneaten in Dean’s duffel. Of the two of them, _Dean’s_ the useless one. He can’t even validate his best friend’s feelings.

"That's kind of you to say," but Cas looks unconvinced, so Dean—

Step three. Grow a pair.

“God, Cas.” Dean flexes his fingers. “Cas,” he tries again, voice breaking, “god. Can I—”

Cas leans forward, hands in his pockets, and kisses Dean on the mouth.

"I'm sorry.” Cas retreats when Dean fails to immediately reciprocate. "Perhaps I misinterpreted—”

“You didn’t misinterpret shit,” Dean says, probably a little wild-eyed, and grabs Cas by the collar.

And when he kisses Cas back, slow and dirty, scratching himself on Cas’ chapped lips and stubbly jaw, he hears something pop, and the light leaking through his eyelids dims.

Dean tips his head back and gapes at the burst security lights.

“I believe that was me,” Cas says, bashful, and Dean punches out a laugh, and he’s still laughing when Cas works his hands beneath his coat, reels him in, and kisses him again. They’re making out next to a grody corpse and they’ve gotta stop before Claire and Sammy show, but right now, Dean wants to see how many more lights they can pop before they have to let go of each other.  

 

* * *

 

In an unprecedented turn of events, Dean beat Sam at rock-paper-scissors for rights to Jody’s guestroom, but now that he’s cooling his heels in isolation, he’s starting to wish he’d taken the couch. Sure, he’d wake up with an epic crick in his neck and a possible need for immediate spinal surgery, but at least Jody’s living room doesn’t have in residence the loudest analog clock this side of an antique shop.

Jody would probably-definitely kill him if he shot her clock. But, real talk, Dean thinks he’d be doing Jody a favor if he put the thing out of its misery; if she replaced it with a digital clock, she wouldn’t have to haul out a stepladder every time its batteries went bad, and a digital clock wouldn’t be this fucking _loud_.

Hinges creak—Dean should probably oil those for Jody before he leaves—and Dean, body angled so he can better glare unblinkingly at the clock on the wall opposite the door, says, “Here for a rematch? What can I say, Sammy, you snooze you lose—”

“I’m not Sam,” says a grit-and-gravel voice that, yeah, couldn’t ever possibly belong to Sam, because if Dean had this kind of visceral reaction to his baby brother’s voice, he’d swallow his gun’s muzzle.

Dean, in a truly Pavlovian display of athleticism, jumps off the bed like it’s on fire, which, shit. He can’t undo reacting to Cas’ presence like a thirsty fucker, but he can fall back on bravado and hope that it’s enough to distract Cas (it probably isn’t).

Dean says, "Thought you were too good for doors."

“It agitates you when I fly.” Cas reaches back to graze his fingertips against the door, and it shuts as firmly as if he’d put his whole weight into it.

But actually. If Cas had put his whole weight into it, he probably would’ve busted the door off its hinges and splintered the frame besides, so.

“Hey.” Dean shifts from foot to foot before forcing himself to stop fidgeting like a virginal teenager on prom night, because 1) he wasn’t virginal when he _was_ a teenager, and 2) he never went to prom. “Look, buddy…” Dean trails off, knowing that he needs to say, _I know I threw a bitch fit and I’m sorry, but you don’t need to hold yourself back on my account_. Except his tongue chooses that moment to glue itself to the roof of his mouth.

“And to my understanding,” Cas goes on when Dean fails to achieve anything like coherency, “an agitated state would be counterproductive to what I have planned.” 

Cas locks the door behind him.

Dean's tongue unsticks, the better to hang out of his mouth while he struggles not to pant like a cartoon wolf at the sight of Little Red Riding Hood's Hartman hips.

Dean doesn’t hear Cas’ feathers rustle when he blinks through the space between them, but that’s probably on account of the blood rushing in his ears. Doesn’t matter, now that he’s got an armful of angel, but he’s still enough of a contrary bastard to say, “Thought you didn’t wanna _agitate_ me—”

"Even if I were to tread carefully, you're very easily piqued," says Cas. "But now I know how to soothe you.”

And Cas skims his teeth over Dean’s lower lip before biting down slow and aching.  

Dean struggles to keep up, to take over, but it's kind of hard to take the lead when your spine's turned to jelly. Dean's the experienced one here; Cas can't even flirt with pretty waitresses named Mandy without Dean's help, so who does this little fucker think he's kidding by putting the moves on Dean like he knows what he's doing? Dean hooks his thumb against the dent in Cas' chin and applies pressure, coaxing him into releasing his hold on Dean’s lip, and presses forward, swiping his tongue over Cas' criminally chapped lips to soften them up. Cas makes a noise, and it's so much like the pained noises he made when he was dying that Dean jolts back, expecting distress, expecting to have to let up because Cas' found a boundary that he doesn't want crossed.

Cas' eyes are wide and wet, and, fuck, that fucking mouth of his is shiny and red instead of chapped and pink, swollen from the pressure Dean put on it, and Dean wonders how _he_ must look if _Cas_ looks like _this_.

 _Not distressed_ , Dean thinks when Cas scrambles for a hold on Dean's face and angles his mouth back down for another kiss. _Definitely not distressed_.

Dean should be keeping one eye open, should be monitoring the bedside lamp for sparks, but his eyes keep fluttering as Cas learns to kiss slow and proper, and he relinquishes his tentative hold on the title of _responsible adult_ in favor of being Cas' willing practice dummy, pulling rhythmically on Cas' hair and ruffling it into some semblance of how it used to look back before Dean knew him, back before Dean wanted him. Dean tilts his head, severing contact, then leans forward again to nudge his face into the musky hollow of Cas' long, stubble-rough throat.

"Lemme suck you off." Dean kisses Cas' pulse, tasting the static electricity on his skin. "Yeah, come on. You want me to, huh, Cas? Want me to suck your dick? I want to, buddy, let me."

And, god, he does. Dean’s always gotten so much _shit_ for his mouth, for how soft and pink and lush it is, especially when he was a kid. Now that he’s bigger and older and meaner-looking, only the really drunk or really stupid have the nerve to call him a cocksucker, but, god, even when he was a grown-ass man in his mid-twenties, people were always insinuating shit in his direction. Dean knew from the glassy looks in their eyes that, yeah, maybe they were trying to hurt him to make themselves feel better about their shit lives, but they weren’t kidding about wanting him to suck them off or eat them out. And Dean’s grown out of looking like a goddamn twink, but he still hates it when his partners wax poetic about his mouth.

But he wants to suck Cas' dick.

He wants Cas to put his fingers in Dean's hair, nails scratching his scalp, and he wants Cas to hold on and look down while Dean sucks him off. He wants Cas to keep that unwavering focus on the stretch of Dean's mouth around his dick, wants him to use that gritty voice to tell Dean how pretty he looks on his knees. He wants Cas to come as much as from just _looking_ at Dean's stretched-out mouth as from the feel of Dean's tongue on his shaft. And, yeah, Dean's officially gone from comfortably half-hard to dribbling precome in his goddamn shorts.  

Cas shakes his head, and Dean mostly figures that it's just in reaction to overstimulation, to Dean's rough mouth on his throat and his hands on his ass, but Dean's gotta be careful, he's gotta get consent, here, so. So, he pulls back far enough to look Cas in the eye and ask him, "What's wrong, buddy? You need me to slow down?”

"I—" Cas trembles, minutely, pretty lashes fluttering, fingers restless where they're planted on Dean's waist, squeezing his love handles and making him wheeze so he doesn't fucking giggle. "I don't want you to use your mouth. Not this time. I want—"

Dean's stomach's been all knotted up since Cas kissed him and blew out that light, and now it pulls that much tighter with disappointment. "You wanna fuck, Cas? Buddy, I don't—”

This. This is the fucking _worst_ , because Dean honestly wants nothing more than for Cas to sit on his dick, wet and easy, and ride him into the goddamn sunset, okay, but the fact is that Dean's hookups have been few and far between lately, what with the Solitary Confinement Special and a general disinterest in anyone who doesn't at least vaguely fit Cas' description, like that dark-haired waitress Dean fucked right before he got walloped with magical Alzheimer’s. And Dean’s got maybe two condoms in his bag—no big deal; Cas ain’t human and they could fuck bareback if they wanted, _oh god_ —and absolutely no lube that hadn’t expired, what, fucking March of last year.

Dean’s stomach gets yanked into his nostrils, but not from the sweeping sense of disappointment. Dean’s organs just got shuffled around because Cas pressed two trembling fingers to his forehead and apparated his ass across the short distance separating them from Jody’s guest bed, like Cas couldn’t be bothered to walk him backward to the mattress, and the only reason Dean doesn’t puke from motion sickness is because he’s distracted by Cas climbing him like a jungle gym.

"Uh," says (wheezes) Dean, stuttering the syllable when Cas ducks down to suck a bruise onto the pad of fat that cushions Dean's jaw.

"It's all right, Dean," Cas says into Dean's pulse point, palms open and warm on Dean's belly where his t-shirt's rucked up. "I purchased supplies from the Gas-n-Sip. The sales associate was very helpful."

" _Uh_ ," Dean says, once more with feeling, mind pinballing between how that jaded sales associate must've felt when Cas turned his intense eyes on them and asked bluntly for their opinion on brands of lube, and the fact that Cas bought lube expecting to get laid—by Dean, specifically—in the first fucking place. God, he can't feel anything but the blood pounding in his dick. "When?" he manages heroically.

"Fifteen minutes ago, approximately." Cas rubs the jut of Dean's belly, thumb grazing the waistband of his boxers where it peeks over his belt, and Dean's thigh jerks reflexively. "I flew," he elaborates, like Dean can't figure it out for himself.

"Hallelujah," Dean croaks, and means it. Then it occurs to him that Cas' kind of doing all the work here, and he can't let that fly, so he puts pressure on Cas' waist, trying to coax him onto his back—only to be flattened against the mattress. "Cas, if you want me to fuck you—" And Dean shudders full-body in reaction to the immediate reality of fucking Cas open and watching his come leak out of his ass once he's done railing him, oh god, _don't come early, don't come early_. "If you wanna fuck, Cas, you gotta give me some leverage, here."

"I want you to fuck me," Cas agrees, holding Dean's hips down when they try to fuck up into him, big thighs bracketing Dean's legs, trench coat spread around them, smothering. "But not this time. This time, I want to fuck you."

Dean. Dean maybe blacks out for a couple of seconds, and when he comes to, Cas' peeled off his shirts and has turned his hyper focused attention to Dean's belt buckle.

"Okay. Okay." Dean's fingers are numb, but he bumps Cas' hands out of the way to fumble open his belt and unzip his jeans, loosening up a bit when the not-fun kind of pressure eases off his dick. "I mean, if you want it that bad, I can take one for the team."

“A true martyr,” says Cas, and Dean’s gonna retort, really, his brain’s not _that_ fried, except then Cas shucks his coat and suit jacket, economic movements somehow hotter than a striptease, and when he hooks his fingers in the knot of his tie to loosen it, Dean just about loses his shit, _what the hell_.

Dean wants to strip Cas himself, peel him open and get as close to the reality of him—to the reality of that huge, winged, shrieking thing packed tight under his human skin—as he can without dying, but he’s in a hurry this time, incapable of thinking much beyond _finally, finally_ , so he squirms out of his pants and shorts—thank god he took his shoes off already, _thank god_ —and watches Cas tear through his shirt’s buttons, rolling his shoulders to free his arms from the sleeves. Cas shuffles off the bed, and Dean goes to grab for him, to pull him back into their humid, shared space, but Cas kicks off his ugly shoes and undoes his pants and comes back to Dean quicker than he left him, and Dean opens his arms to catch him and clutch at him.

Cas didn't bother to take off his slacks, he wants Dean that bad, dick pulled through the slit in his boxers and hanging out of his open fly, damp head smearing a line down Dean's stomach before bumping Dean's own cock. Dean doesn't even care anymore, doesn't care that he must look stupid and grimy to this holy, pristine thing, and lets his eyes roll right back in his skull at the soft, bloodwarm feel of Cas' dick, groping his shoulders and rocking into the not-wet-enough contact.

"Dean." Cas sighs it into the crook of Dean's neck, rolling his hips slow, and Dean wonders if Cas can feel his dying cells as well as see them, feel them now that they're this close, sweating all over each other. That's a boner killer if Dean’s ever thought of one, though, so he focuses on Cas’ cock, on the friction, and that’s easier, that’s better.

"Yeah," Dean says, incoherent from sex, holding on tight to Cas' flexing shoulder blades, legs churning against the mattress, trying to spread wider to better accommodate Cas' weight between them. "I got you. I'm here, buddy. I got you."

Cas sits back on his heels, palming Dean's thighs, and Dean hisses at the stretch and burn of muscle when Cas tries to push up his legs to expose his ass. Cas catches the discomfort, though, dropping Dean's legs and dropping his weight back onto him to kiss his cheek, asking, "What's wrong? Do you not want to?"

 _Yeah fucking right_ he doesn't want to; he doesn't wanna be dramatic, but he'll probably die from lack of oxygen to the brain if he doesn't get off soon.

"No, baby, that's not it." Dean pets Cas' hair, rocking his hips slow and absentminded as he struggles to string words into sentences and sentences into coherency. "That's not. I'm not twenty anymore, Cas, I don’t bend that way. Let me. I’m gonna turn over, okay?”

"Yes.” Cas eases his weight off Dean to turn Dean over, and Dean feels like a lazy fuck, letting Cas do all the work, but if this is what makes Cas feel good, if this is what makes Cas happy, then okay. "Is that better, Dean?"

Dean presses his cheek to the pillow, grinding his dick slow and steady against the comforter while he tries not to think of the dry cleaning he’ll have to pay for once they're through. "Yeah. Yeah, this is good." Dean feels Cas straddle his hips, his cock tight and full against Dean's ass, his weight comforting, and lets his lashes flutter.

He can barely keep his eyes open, but he watches Cas lean over the trench coat that's discarded beside them, retrieving the lube he bought just for Dean, just so he could fuck him and come in him. Dean worms a hand under his hips, holds his dick by the base so he doesn't come from the thought and the shock of Cas holding him open and dribbling lube onto his ass. He turns his head and pants into the pillow.

"You misunderstood me, I think," says Cas, because of course he'd choose now of all times to talk at Dean, and he keeps on talking even as he starts to open Dean up, slick pressure. "When I said that I must endure watching you die in slow motion.”

Dean shoves the hand that's not on his cock under the pillow, squeezing the case that's been thinned out from too many washings. "Man, your dirty talk blows."

Cas kisses Dean's spine, stretching him burning and slow around another finger. Dean wonders if Cas watches a lot of gay porn, or if he’s been seeing people put their fingers up other people’s asses from on high since humans figured out that sex can be a recreational sport.

"I didn't mean to say that your mortality has put me off pursuing a relationship with you, although your apparent disinterest compounded by the divine order not to fraternize with humans discouraged me for a time.”  

"Fuck that," Dean says, clipping the final _T_ in _that_ hard between his teeth when Cas spreads his fingers inside of Dean. "Not like you can get me pregnant with angel spawn." Also, fuck him straight back to Hell for ever making Cas feel unwanted. Dean's such a _jackass_.

"All I meant," Cas goes on, voice thick with sex, slacks scratching Dean's thighs when Dean churns against him, "was that I want to savor the time I have with you."

"What about." Dean bites down on the pillow, cotton case soaking up the spit pooled in his mouth and drying out his tongue. "What about the—" He moans low when Cas pulls his fingers out and pushes them back in a minute later soaked in another coating of lube. "What about. Not _fraternizing_ with humans, huh? You over that?"

"It was of some concern at the outset." Dean would think that Cas’ unaffected, what with the way he's still forming complete sentences, but the hand not working Dean open is trembling where it's anchored on the small of his back. "But I find," Cas pulls out his fingers, and Dean tenses all over when he hears him uncap the lube again, hears him slicking up his dick to fuck Dean, "that I no longer care."

"Oh god," Dean chokes out, coming off the pillow when he feels it, when he feels Cas' fat cockhead nudge his asshole, and they're both so wet from the lube that Dean can't even feel Cas' precome, but he knows it's leaking out of him in spurts, because that's how bad he wants to fuck Dean. "Oh god," Dean punches out again when the tip of Cas' dick breaches Dean's stretched rim. He crams his fist against his mouth.

"You’re beautiful." Cas rubs his back, soothing him with his hands while he splits him open with his dick, stopping when Dean clenches, easing farther in when Dean forces himself to relax. "Dean, you're so beautiful."

That, of all things, makes Dean flush harder than the feel of the dick stretching his ass. "Cas, no, you gotta—" Cas bottoms out, zipper grating Dean's ass, thighs flexing against Dean's, and Dean's head drops back down, loose and heavy on his neck. He pants hard, manages, "Buddy, baby, you gotta. Be quiet." They aren’t the only ones in this house; they’ve gotta _be quiet_.

Cas curves a hand around Dean's throat, pulls Dean up, bows his spine into a _U_ and kisses the crown of his head. Dean's panting so hard he sounds like he's fucking sobbing, and Cas is treating him reverently, bending knee to Dean in a way that God probably never intended. Dean thinks—thinks as best as he can past the pressure of Cas' cock inside him—thinks of those other angels, the ones who took God too literally when He asked them to love mankind. What is it about grimy humanity that draws angels in, anyway? Is that why so many of the fuckers are determined to treat humans like vermin? Are they afraid of what they'll feel if they admit that, hey, people aren't so bad?

"No, Dean.” Cas rocks his hips against Dean's ass, shallow, but it's enough. It's enough to pull Dean firmly back to what's happening, to what Cas is doing to him. “Think only of me. I want you to—think only of me.”

Dean should say something, but then Cas might stop fucking him, so he just moans low and wrecked, squirming when Cas finds a better, deeper rhythm and starts to fuck him hard and slow. He's straddling Dean's ass and stroking his spine and curling his hips back and forth, and it's good, it's great, it stings but Dean wouldn't trade it for anything else, legs shifting restlessly and spine curling, mouth loose and open around choked-off moans that he’s gotta suppress, the others are a floor or less away, he’s gotta hold it in.  

 _That's it_ , Dean thinks, because he won't let himself say it out loud, won't let himself shout the way he wants to. _That's it, fuck me. Fuck me_.

Cas loves him. He’s fucking Dean because he loves him, not because he wants to use him. Cas won’t leave him. Cas’ll keep him like this, holding him down and fucking him forever.  

Cas stops, though, tugging his dick all the way out, and Dean starts to turn, starts to bitch at him, but Cas' just rearranging them, sitting back on his knees and lifting Dean's hips so his ass is in the air. Dean turns his face and watches, even though it strains his neck, watches Cas grip himself and feed his cock back into Dean's ass. Dean makes an awful noise, head dropping back down, then makes it again when he feels Cas spread his ass, feels Cas shift his weight and lean back.

He's watching. Cas is watching himself fuck Dean, he's watching his cock work Dean open, and then Dean feels it, feels Cas' thumb circle his rim where Cas' cock stretches it sloppy, and Dean could come from that. He feels it, he feels the pressure pull his dick tight and unbearable and straining, but he's not twenty, like he said, and he can't come untouched no matter how turned on he is, so he—so he braces an elbow against the squealing mattress and wraps his hand around his dick, jacking it quick, and he seizes up and shudders and comes in ropes all over the pretty needlepoint comforter, so hard it makes his stomach ache.

Forget dry cleaning; they’ll have to burn these sheets.

He's basically dead weight after that, the hand he’s got braced against the mattress caught in a numbed fist, but Cas' got him, Cas' always got him, and he pulls out again, he turns Dean onto his back, dragging him through Dean’s own mess, and Dean said he can't take the stretch but he's taking it, he's lying there with his mouth gaped and his eyes struggling to stay open, to stay open and watch Cas when Cas pushes up his legs and fucks him, unsteady now, not even all the way undressed, face scrunched, and the lamp. The lamp flickers, and Dean can hear them, can hear Cas' wings beat, can feel the thunderheads gathering under Cas' skin.

Cas comes hard and fast and wet inside of Dean, and Dean releases another wrecked, trembling moan at the feel of it, but then his weighted-down eyelids snap open at what he's hearing. Cas is moaning, sex noises like his pained noises, fucking his cock into Dean's ass, and the lamp's not flickering, it's sparking, sparking like the lights in the barn where Dean met Cas, and it bursts and it's fucking destroyed, and then the light in the hallway bleeding through the cracks in the door disappears too, and all Dean can see is the disc of light that outlines Cas’ head, the light that leaks through his eyes and out of his gaping mouth, bluish white like a halogen lamp.

Dean hears someone shout, “Jesus _CHRIST_.” It’s not him, or Cas. Actually, it sounds like Claire.

The light coming out of Cas fades as soon as it flared, and Dean can barely see a damn thing with every light in the house blown out, but he feels Cas let up his bruise-tight grip on Dean’s thighs, feels it when he moves his hands to brace himself on the bed above Dean. Dean inhales, smells the sex on Cas, and his dick gives another painful, halfhearted jerk when it tries to come dry.

Cas works his hips absently like even now he’s not finished with Dean, like he could keep going while Dean lies beneath him, worked over and soft, and he probably could.

"Um," says Cas. "The neighborhood has experienced a blackout. I think it’s my fault.”  

Dean wheezes, and keeps on wheezing, and realizes belatedly that he's laughing. "Christ," he says, hoarse. "This ever. This ever happen before? When you, you know." Dean tries to mime jerking off, but his hand won't move the way he wants it to. "Or, hell, even when you kissed Meg. I don’t remember it happening like this.”

"No.” Cas shuffles back on his knees, softening dick flopping out of Dean's sore ass. "But then, I was never this…excited before.”  

Dean's ruined, but he's still got enough energy to wink at Cas like a jackass.

Cas frames Dean's face in his hands and kisses him soft and reverent. Dean wants to turn away from the affection, but he lets himself take it. Lets himself have Cas.

“I can feel it.” Cas rests his forehead against Dean’s, hovering over him. “Michael’s grace is dwindling, and I’ll need to depart soon.”  

Dean’s stomach swoops. It’s not like he didn’t expect this, though.

"To find Kelly Kline and her hell spawn while you still got the extra juice. I got it." Dean tries to squirm out from under Cas, mostly to get away from the congealing wet spot, and also to wash Cas' come out of him, but Cas drops down onto Dean and squishes him into the mattress. "Fuck, Cas, back off. I'm not bailing on you, okay? I just need a shower."

"I'll return to you," Cas says, ignoring Dean's very human need to bathe, nuzzling the underside of his jaw. "I won’t leave you, Dean.”

Dean clenches his teeth against the hot pressure that settles in his eyes, across the bridge of his nose.  

Cas says, “Also, I need to restore the neighborhood's powerlines."

Dean wonders if anyone else in this house saw Cas walk into this room after Dean, noted the way the power fried twenty minutes later, and did the simple math. Fuck, Dean _cannot_ deal.

Dean's stomach hurts from Cas’ weight, but he flops one arm around Cas' back and gives him a squeeze. "You should. You should probably go.”  

Before Cas loses his wings all over again. Before he’s grounded again. Before something _else_ fucks them over.

"Hmmm, yes." Cas sucks on the tip of Dean's ear, wet pressure like the wet stuck to Dean’s back and the wet leaking out of his ass. "Tomorrow."

"Yeah, okay." Dean squeezes Cas harder. "Tomorrow."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings:** Eye trauma (minor character); referenced sexual harassment (Dean). 
> 
> And if you've made it this far, thanks for giving my first SPN fic a shot!


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